4 - The scope of the death of Christ

Summary

There are aspects of the religious experience reflected in the Pauline epistles which make it difficult to avoid the conclusion that Paul thought of the risen Christ in much the same way as a theist thinks of God – as personal but supra-individual. This, as we have seen, is what seems to emerge from an examination of Paul's incorporative language. By contrast, we have just seen that, for most of the other writers in the New Testament, Jesus, though transcendent and uniquely close to God, is conceived of in much more individualistic ways. And yet – and this is the point of this chapter and the next – there are certain assumptions, made in common by Paul and the non-Pauline writers alike, which, by implication, point to precisely that supra-individual aspect of Christ which the non-Pauline writers do not make explicit. In other words, my thesis is that Paul's ‘corporate Christ’ alone ‘makes sense’ of the experience reflected even by the writers who do not explicitly acknowledge it: their assumptions go further than their expressions.

It is two such assumptions that will now be considered. The first, in this chapter, is the assumption that the results of the death of Christ are available universally. The second, in the next chapter, is the assumption that Christ fulfils Scripture.